Editor Profile: Rena Mosteirin

1. Who are you reading right now?

The books on my bedside table are all poetry at the moment:

Anne Carson The Beauty of the Husband

Lucille Clifton Blessing the Boats

Keetje Kuipers Beautiful in the Mouth

Jessica Fisher Frail-Craft

Kevin Yang An Aquarium

Denise Duhmel Two and Two

2. Do you write on paper or use your computer to generate a first draft?

Computer. I have a light laptop that’s always with me. When I have an idea and I can’t pull out my laptop I use the notepad app on my phone.

3. What books/authors do you keep coming back to?

Every morning I open up Moby-Dick and type a line out of the book into Twitter. I’m tweeting the whole book as a way to deepen my relationship to the text. I’ve done a series of erasure poems based on it. Every year at Christmas I re-read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass is written in this funny, crazy, loving way and the illustrations are gorgeous. In fiction I can’t get enough Shirley Jackson, Siri Hustvedt, Louise Erdrich, Ann Beattie, Cristina Garcia. Sandor Marai’s work stays with me long after I’ve turned the last page, especially Embers. My poetic obsessions currently are Rainer Maria Rilke, Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr and C.D Wright.

4. Are you working on a larger project right now?

I’m working on a young adult series called Red Barn Records about a group of female best friends who are brilliant: an artist, a musician, a horsewoman, a budding engineer and computer scientist. Together they create a recording studio in a red barn the summer before their senior year of high school. They record a folk-punk record and make a podcast detailing the superpowers of their neighbors in this small town in Vermont. The podcast reveals stunning truths about their neighbors and reunites two prisoners of war.

            They navigate a coming-out, an eating disorder, a first love and a love-triangle. In the second book, which I’m just finishing the first draft of now, they take on sexual assault and transgender teenage hood. I love this project. The characters feel real to me. There was a time in my life when I lived in a red barn with a bunch of dazzling women, and working on these books gives me a chance to honor that time.

5. What inspires you?

                        The Fourth Wave of feminism inspires me and motivated me to make Bloodrootlit.org happen in a digital way. Other digital projects of mine include an end-word map generator which is a tool I wrote to help poets write sestinas—the code itself is a sestina!—the Moby-Dick Twitter project, and my poetry blog White Whale Crossing which is like a digital notebook and home to 355 of my poems. When I started blogging, I was having this recurring nightmare of being buried alive. That was an inspiration too—I realized in order to make the nightmare stop, I needed to get my voice out there. I want to be heard.